bitter where it borders on taste
by isawet
Summary: Post "One." Dani comes to terms with Roman, drinking, fruit. Reese/Crews.


Dani waits for Crews. It's early in the morning, so early that grey light has just started creeping across the floors and the walls of the garage, and the crime scene unit members take pictures and set up flags with quiet, contained efficiency, stifling yawns and murmuring to one another.

There are dog kennels in the garage, pushed back up against the walls with their doors hanging open. Dani looks at the spots of rust on the thin metal rods and tries to think of nothing.

"Reese," Crews says, like he's been saying her name for a while, and Dani starts.

"I've been waiting," she says, and when she turns to look he's watching her watch the cage.

/

"Detective Reese," Tidwell says as they turn to leave, and Dani hesitates. "I'd like a word."

Dani rests her fingers on her hip, just beside where her gun is holstered. "Is it about the case?"

"Yes," Tidwell says.

"Liar," Dani says, and grabs her jacket.

Tidwell grits his teeth. "Dani." She stops.

"Reese," Crews says, and his eyes are very calm. She shakes her head at him, the smallest flicker of her hair, and he nods. He drops the arm he was using to hold the door open and stands at parade rest behind her.

"Crews," Tidwell says, "do you mind?"

"My partner says don't go, I don't go," Crews says.

"I'll let you know about the case," Dani says, and holds the door for Crews to come behind her, his presence warm at her back.

/

Dani thinks about Roman when she drinks. She stays away from vodka because it reminds her of a smiling man with a gun at her kitchen table, in her space touching her things, and the smell of scotch reminds her of her father thumping down the hall home late at night from the cop bar. She drinks bourbon from coffee mugs on the nightstand until she falls asleep and a couple swallows in the morning to wake her up.

She drinks in little sips and thinks about the way Roman smiled when he slapped her across the face.

/

Crews is eating diced melon with a metal toothpick at his desk, curling his tongue around each cube of fruit before rolling the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. "It is not the peak that sustains the mountain, but the sides," he says.

Dani's pen runs out of ink and she opens her drawer for a new one. "What?"

"It's the journey," Crews says, "not the destination."

Dani resists the urge to snort. "It sounds like you got that out of a fortune cookie."

"I did," Crews says. "It's like wisdom in a crunchy edible pocket. Pocket wisdom you can put in your pocket."

"Great," Dani says, and slams her drawer shut. "I can't find a damn pen."

Crews spears a chunk of fruit and offers it across the desk to her. "Muskmelon? It'll make you feel better."

Dani opens her mouth to refuse and stops short. "_Musk_melon?"

"Muskmelon," Crews repeats, and Dani shakes it off.

"No Crews, I don't want your-melon. I want a pen that works."

"It's not the goal that sustains you, but the journey," Crews says, and Dani picks up her dead pen and shoves the tip into the fruit he's still holding out.

"That did make me feel better."

/

Crews and Dani never speak of her father. After weekends and holidays he asks after her mom and she tells him the short version. That her mother has started helping out at the church but not that she watches the news every night and cries, that her mother has stopped drinking too much at dinner but not that it's because her mother remembered what Dani looked like after the first stint in rehab.

Dani wonders about the girl, that Seybolt girl, and where she is, and once in a while talks with Ted standing in Crews' empty house waiting for him to come down in the mornings. Sometimes Ted gives her a slice of pizza wrapped in paper towels, or a carton of fried rice to eat during a stakeout.

"You look better lately," her mother says in Farsi, "you should come to dinner more often."

"I will," Dani promises, and thinks the kitchen, with its faded yellow paint and the worn out cross stained oily with cooking smoke hanging above the stove looks brighter without her father in it.

/

Dani comes around a corner at a full sprint, pursuing a suspect, and has enough time to curse in her head as she sees the movement out of the corner of her eye before he's on her, a tweaked out meth dealer who'd taken one look at her and Crews and bolted.

At first, it's a quick sharp pain, like she's been gutpunched, and then her vision starts to slide sideways and she realizes she's been stabbed.

"Son of a-" she curses, reaching for him, but he skitters out of her gasp and starts to climb the fence, the chain link rattling against the brick as he claws at it. Dani leans back against the wall, panting, and presses a hand just above her hip, where the bone gives way to the fleshy part of her belly. The sound of expensive leather loafers creaking as their hard soles slap the asphalt get louder and louder, and Crews careens around the corner, his tie flapping. He catches the perp by the ankle and yanks him down, throws him up against the fence and hits him twice in the ribcage, the same spot, hard unforgiving jabs that make bone crack. The perp drops to his knees, panting and retching, and Crews turns to her.

"Reese," he says, out of breath, and catches her as she slides limply to the ground. "Reese!"

"I'm right here, Crews," she says, and gasps as he links his fingers with hers to press down on where her blood is slippery and hot against her palms.

"Officer in need of assistance," Crews is saying into his phone, in those hard clipped tones he get when he's serious, when he's more Crews than Charlie. "Stay awake."

"Yeah," Dani mumbles, and her head lolls when he shakes her.

"Reese," he says, "tell me about Roman."

"What."

"About Roman," he says again.

Dani feels herself grow heavier, her head in the crook of Crews' arm. "You came and got me," she mutters.

"You watch the cages," Crews says, "I see you. You watch the bars in the windows and the gates in the frences."

"Yes," Dani says on an exhale, and she can hear the sirens. "Just because you're there doesn't mean you have to be there."

"Yes," Crews says, and holds her hand until the paramedics come.

/

They find Dani's father in the desert, Jack Reese identified by his fingerprints because the birds and the coyotes had eaten the soft parts of his face. Dani goes to the morgue and stands in front of the body bag, drumming her fingers on her leg.

"Are you sure?" The morgue attendant asks, and Dani takes a deep breath.

"Yes," she says, and the zipper is the loudest thing she's ever heard in her life.

Crews is standing in the hallway when Dani comes out of the bathroom, her breath smelling like vomit and cold sweat on the back of her neck. He walks with her down the hallway and out the door, into the sun.

"I have to go tell my mother," Dani says, squinting against the glare. "I have to go tell my mother her husband of thirty years robbed a bank, sent my partner to prison for four murders that he ordered done, and was killed as part of the conspiracy cover up." They stand in silence for a long time.

"Do you know why I like fruit?" Crews asks. "It's the crunch, that first bite of the flesh. It's evocative, Reese. You bite into an apple and you can taste autumn, the leaves changing, the wind in your hair. Fresh fruit is life."

Dani waits a beat and slips on her sunglasses, the ones Crews had got her for Christmas, over her face. The glare lessens and she can see clear across the parking lot.

/

"Crews," Crews says, and he sounds awake. Dani wonders if he's standing in that closet of his, answering his phone while he watches the web of people who ruined his life for money stretch across his walls.

"Do you know what I hated you most for?" Dani asks. She drains three fingers of scotch in one swallow and gestures at the bartender for more. "It was for ruining the image of my father."

"Reese?" Crews asks in her ear, "Are you in a bar?"

"I know my father isn't a good man," Dani says, and watches the golden liquid splash across the rim of her glass. "I've known that since I was twelve. But I thought he was... a righteous man."

"Are you drunk, Reese?"

"Someone who worked hard for everything he got, someone who dedicated his life to order and laws and society. And you destroyed that, Crews, you took it all." They sit in silence for a moment, and Dani listens to Crews breathe, drinks down three more servings of expensive alcohol. She thinks about the first time she got high, the clean pure rush of it and how no other hit even came close.

"I know," Crews says finally. "Tell me where you are."

/

Dani wakes in Crews' bed with her partner stretched out beside her, still with his tie and shoes on.

"You're a chatty drunk," he says, and Dani licks at the dryness of her mouth.

"Am I?"

"Compared to your usual," he says. Dani sits up and rubs the sleep from her eyes.

"You gonna tell Tidwell on me?"

"Are you going to keep drinking?"

"No," Dani says automatically, feels ill. "I don't know-no. We're not talking about this."

"Apple?" Crews asks, and Dani grabs a bottle of water off the edge of the bed, drains it.

"Yeah," she says, and his eyebrows lift very slightly in surprise. She takes the fruit from him.

"Honeycrisp," he says.

Dani takes the first bite, warm from Crews' skin, the crunch of her teeth through to the core. "Autumn," she says, and Crews smiles.

Dani leans back against the wall and closes her eyes. "You should really get some pillows," she says. "And a frame."

"I am not attached to this bed," Crews says, and she feels him shift his weight on the mattress. "The jug fills drop by drop."

Dani takes another bite of apple. "I like that," she says, and the scar on her belly pulls as she stretches.

Crews' breath blows across her cheek. "I do too," he says.


End file.
